Render Unto
Hail, Caesar! / directed by Joel Coen
Hail, Caesar!, the latest from the Coen Brothers, is a cheerfully modest film, a confection wrapped in an enigma cloaked in a pastiche. To say its plot revolves around the mysterious kidnapping of a major Hollywood star for purposes unknown is to fall unforgivably for the film’s playfully dramatic misdirection. After all, it turns out to be less than an outright kidnapping, and something more amusing and idiosyncratic, like, oh, an attempt by secretly Communist screenwriters to gently convert said star to their capitalism-critiquing crusade. Hail, Caesar! may be more about casually exploring or evoking a state of mind than anything else - that state of mind being the curious concoction of business, fantasy, and human relations that constitutes Hollywood, at least Hollywood in its temporal setting of the early 1950’s. Hail, Caesar! is a virtual museum or catalogue of films within a film, encompassing cowboy action, spy farce, water ballet, musicals, and historical epics; it frequently feels as if it’s simply pausing to pay loving homage these older, mostly abandoned forms.
Overall, Hail, Caesar! feels more like a collection of delights than a full-scale movie. Apart from the charms of its filmic insertions, Hail, Caesar! is chock full of smart silliness: a scene with Frances McDormand as a film editor who tempts fate by wearing a scarf to her spinning-reel-intensive job is a near classic. As cowboy star Hobie Doyle, actor Alden Ehrenreich pulls off a double-hitter: fantastically evoking the charisma and charm of his fictional character while also impressing as a newcomer few in the audience likely will have seen before. Channing Tatum plays a song and dance star who’s secretly a Russian agent, a decision that enables an amazing sequence in which the aforementioned Communist scriptwriters row him to a midnight rendezvous with a Soviet sub, as he stands on the gunwale clutching his pet cat, like the hero of the Motherland he apparently is.